🪶 Author’s Note: This article shares my personal observations and understanding from working in IT. It’s not meant to criticize or blame anyone, but to reflect on how our industry is evolving — where roles, responsibilities, and deep system knowledge are often unclear. The goal is simple: spark thoughtful reflection and encourage real engineering, not just automation. Let’s start

🧩 1.“Misunderstanding, undefined, unclear roles”

Reality:

Companies say “We need DevOps or SRE”, but they don’t know what that actually means.

HR writes one vague job post mixing Jenkins, Kubernetes, Grafana, Java, Terraform, and security scanning.

The result → confusion between operations, engineering, and automation.

No ownership clarity — everyone touches something, but no one owns the end-to-end lifecycle.

Nature: ➡️ IT is suffering from role dilution — job titles grow faster than understanding. ➡️ “Buzzword hiring” replaces “system-level engineering mindset.”

🧱 2.“No system and application engineering knowledge”

Reality:

Many engineers know tools (Docker, Jenkins, Git) but not how TCP/IP works, how JVM behaves, or what happens inside Linux kernel namespaces.

DevOps has become “script automation” instead of system orchestration.

Few understand fundamentals like:

How threads, sockets, and memory interact.

How to tune network latency or JVM GC.

How storage I/O affects container performance.

Nature: ➡️ Shallow expertise due to tool obsession, not engineering mindset. ➡️ Engineers who understand system internals (like you aim to) are becoming rare and precious.

🔒 3.“Huge MNCs with boundaries defined roles”

Reality:

Enterprise-level silos still exist:

“This is infra team’s job.”

“App team doesn’t touch servers.”

“Monitoring is done by a different org.”

Each team guards its box → no end-to-end visibility or accountability.

Nature: ➡️ “Ownership fragmentation” — DevOps culture promised collaboration but in MNCs it became another layer instead of removing layers.

🖥️ 4.“No complete handovered responsibilities over servers”

Reality:

Many DevOps/SRE engineers don’t have root-level control or production access — they manage from pipelines or dashboards.

Operations responsibility is partially given, but not fully trusted.

Nature: ➡️ Security and compliance fears lead to “read-only DevOps.” ➡️ Engineers are accountable for uptime without real access.

🧠 5.“Lack of confidence and copy-paste culture”

Reality:

Too much dependency on Google, Stack Overflow, ChatGPT.

People copy scripts, YAMLs, or Helm charts without understanding the context.

They fear breaking something because they don’t know the system behavior underneath.

Nature: ➡️ “Automation without comprehension.” ➡️ Engineers become script runners, not system thinkers.

🤖 6.“AI everywhere”

Reality:

AI tools help, but also worsen laziness.

Instead of learning fundamentals, many rely on prompts to write configs or debug issues.

AI amplifies good engineers — but replaces average engineers.

Nature: ➡️ The IT world is shifting from “skill-based engineers” to “prompt-based operators.”

⚖️ So — what kind of IT is this?

It’s an AI-driven, fragmented, pseudo-engineering era where:

Roles are defined by tool usage, not technical depth.

Job boundaries are rigid, but ownership is unclear.

Engineers chase certifications, not competence.

True system and performance engineers are rare and valuable.

💡 The Counterbalance — The Real Engineers’ Path

If you master:

System-level understanding (OS, network, storage, kernel, JVM)

Deep observability (metrics, tracing, performance tuning)

Security and resilience engineering

Automation with reasoning, not repetition

Then you will stand far above the “toolchain crowd.”